Beginning with an analysis of William Prinsep’s watercolour of nautch dancers (circa 1840), this chapter discusses the figure of the Indian nautch dancer as ‘homo sacer’, the killable target of anti-nautch dance bans introduced in British colonial India. It focuses on the British-controlled colonial city of Calcutta, a dynamic and experimental hub in nineteenth-century undivided Bengal, where the management of native populations, including sex workers and dancers, were led by colonial-era scientific and commercial agendas, and which resulted in an intersectional race-gender-caste-based violence against professional nautch women. Examining a series of newspaper reports from the colonial archive that prominently feature nautch events, the chapter tracks changing British attitudes towards nautch dancing, ranging from mild tolerance to total denouncement. A ‘corpo-active’ method of re-animating nautch archives through the body is introduced as a framework for the book, which resurfaces nautch subjects from visual and material archives as active agents rather than passive victims of tragedy. Overall, the chapter provides an overview of three broad tendencies against or with which the whole book moves: nautch as contagion, nautch as disappearance and nautch as ‘survivance’.

The chapter begins with a survey of literature on nineteenth-century colonial exhibitions and world’s fairs as a cultural practice and the complicity of academic disciplines such as anthropology and ethnology in promoting violent forms of pedagogy. It provides a brief overview of the ‘nasty’ Indian nautch, a racially charged practice framed simultaneously by colonial desire and abhorrence, which moved between the Empire’s exhibitions and theatres as disturbances. It then examines one particular colonial exhibition, the failed Liberty of London’s 1885 exhibition, and specifically analyses the work of nautch dancers whose moving bodies both engaged and disrupted the scopophilia framing live human exhibits. The chapter then listens to the dissenting voices of Liberty’s performers and delves into the legal proceedings they set in motion against their producers. In the final section, the chapter examines how re-imagining the Liberty’s nautch experience by embodying archival silences and slippages might be a usefully anarchic ‘corpo-active’ method that animates the memories of subaltern dancers forgotten by both British and Indian nationalist history.

This chapter examines the fictions of nautch dancers painted by local artists (patuas) in nineteenth-century Kalighat paintings from Bengal. Part I, ‘Bazaar Art, Bazaari Women’, highlights key features and techniques of Kalighat paintings in representing the female/courtesan figure (or Bibi). Part II, ‘Patuas and Performance’, discusses the intimacy between visual and performance worlds in Kalighat paintings, noticing how patuas borrowed gestures and bodies from Bengal’s performance forms such as jatra and khemta. Through contemporary social satires and reviews produced by caste-privileged, Bengali male authors, the chapter tracks a growing anti-nautch narrative targeting the baiji and khemta dancers of Bengal whilst popular circulation of their imagery through Kalighat paintings flourished. Part III, ‘Murdering Dance’, examines two real murders: the 1873 Tarakeshwar case, a sensational event that rocked Calcutta and was captured in several notable Kalighat paintings, and the 1875 Sonagachi murder case of Golap, a sex worker in Calcutta. Visual traces of these two murders are read as part of an anti-nautch discourse in which colonial law and native patriarchy centred violence against a dancer’s body within debates on female sexual desire and deviance, and against which subaltern women performed their insurgent gestures of refusal.

This chapter maps the prolific appearance of nautch sundaris (beauties) and jans (beloveds) in South Asian popular visual culture in a period of growing anti-colonial nationalism and anti-nautch regulation in India. Visual traces of dancer-actresses are studied alongside established theatre history primary texts to re-presence the overlooked labour of dancing, a fundamental part of innovative and seditious vernacular dramaturgies that inaugurated modern Bengali drama. Part I, ‘The Age of Mechanical Reprodarshan’, narrates the intimacy of the red-light district and the popular printing presses of Kansaripara Art Studio and Chorebagan Art Studio in Calcutta. It argues that actress-dancers proliferated in print in the unique visual participatory space of darshan. Part II, ‘The Sundaris (Beauties)’ traces the many sundaris – real and fictional – appearing in popular visual prints and in Calcutta’s theatres. Part III, ‘The Jans (Beloveds)’ examines nautch on the humble and ubiquitous matchbox label. A reading of the real and fictional beloveds – Khorshed Jan, Pokhraj Jan, Sanichar Jan, Bani Jan and the celebrated Gauhar Jan (1873 –1930) – explores how the circulation of the Jan series on matchboxes brought about a change in modes of patronage and spectatorship for nautch in the subcontinent in the early twentieth century.

This chapter focuses on the history of the Prague Conservatory from its inception to the end of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Founded in 1811, the Prague Conservatory is the second oldest institution of its kind in Europe outside of Italy, following the Paris Conservatory established in 1795. The first part of the chapter explores the development of the institution’s curriculum under the director Friedrich Dionys Weber. Subsequently, the chapter explores how the conservatory achieved international prestige in the second half of the nineteenth century. The last part of the chapter discusses how the rising nationalistic tensions in Prague during the late Habsburg period influenced the conservatory’s operations.

Chapter Five presents historical analysis to establish two key points that lay a foundation for the normative argument presented in Chapter Six. First, throughout the nineteenth century, federal courts applied a system of weak judicial review in which they enforced treaty-based rules to protect individual rights from government infringement. Therefore, the type of weak review system I am proposing in Chapter Six has deep historical roots in American public law. Second, due to a largely invisible constitutional transformation that occurred between 1945 and 1965, international human rights treaties are not currently available to U.S. courts as a source of judicially enforceable rights. However, under current constitutional understandings, Congress has the power to make human rights treaties judicially enforceable by enacting an appropriate statute to that effect.

This chapter asks: how did institutionalised political participation, individual equality and, in particular, their fusion survive into and develop during the nineteenth century, and what can we learn from the historical genesis of democracy as a composite of two different elements, as sketched in this book, for the predicament of democracy today?

The Introduction introduces the central research questions of the study and summarizes the main arguments. It also lays out the research design and discusses the key concepts and how it measures them. Finally, it provides summaries of all of the chapters in the book.

Chapter 2 uses an original database on historical elections in South America to explore when and where democracy first emerged in the region. Scholars traditionally portrayed nineteenth-century elections in Latin America as farces, but in recent years historians have challenged this view. This chapter shows that many South American elections in the nineteenth century involved significant participation and competition, and a few were even free and fair. Nevertheless, authoritarian rule predominated. Most elections were non-competitive, numerous restrictions on the franchise existed, and voter turnout tended to be low in comparison to Europe and the United States. Moreover, the few democratic episodes in the nineteenth century proved to be quite brief, as the freely elected presidents were either overthrown or subverted democracy to perpetuate themselves or their allies in power. However, in the first three decades of the twentieth century, a great divide occurred. A few South American countries, namely Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Uruguay, established democratic regimes that lasted a dozen years or more. By contrast, authoritarian rule deepened in the other six countries of the region

Chapter 4 examines what led to the emergence of the strong parties that helped bring about democracy in some South American countries. It shows that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, relatively strong national parties arose in Chile, Colombia, and Uruguay, and, to a lesser extent, in Argentina and Paraguay, but not in the other countries of the region. Two main factors shaped party development during this period. First, strong parties emerged in countries that had intense but relatively balanced religious or territorial cleavages, where neither side of a cleavage clearly dominated the other. Religious issues, in particular, generated passions that politicians could exploit to build parties. Second, strong parties tended to emerge in countries that had populations concentrated in relatively small areas without major geographic barriers. In these countries, it was easier for politicians to mount national campaigns and for party leaders to develop organizations that penetrated the entire country. These arguments are explored through comparative statistics and brief case studies of party development in all ten South American countries.

Chapter 5 shows how the development of strong parties and professional militaries contributed to the emergence of enduring democracies in Chile and Uruguay. Both countries developed strong parties during the late nineteenth century thanks in part to the geographic concentration of the population and the existence of relatively balanced cleavages. During the nineteenth century, these parties at times sought power via armed revolts, but once the military professionalized, the opposition began to focus exclusively on the electoral route to power. This occurred in the late nineteenth century in Chile, but not until the early twentieth century in Uruguay. In both countries, opposition parties pushed for democratic reforms to enfranchise their supporters and level the electoral playing field. It was not until the ruling party split, however, that the opposition managed to enact major reforms, which occurred in Chile in 1890 and Uruguay in 1917. In both countries, strong opposition parties played a central role not only in the enactment of the reforms but also in their enforcement.

Chapter 1 lays out the central theoretical arguments of the book. It argues that three factors played a key role in the emergence of democracy in region: the professionalization of the military, the rise of strong opposition parties, and splits within the ruling party. It analyzes what led to the professionalization of the military and the rise of strong opposition parties and it shows how they led to varying regime outcomes in different South American countries. This chapter also discusses why existing theories of democratization cannot fully explain the emergence of democracy in the region

Chapter 8 examines the failed struggle for democracy in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Paraguay during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In contrast to the other South American countries, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Paraguay made relatively little progress in professionalizing their armies in the early twentieth century and were not able to establish a monopoly on violence. As a result, the opposition, especially in Paraguay and Ecuador, continued to seek power via armed revolt, which undermined constitutional rule and encouraged state repression. The weakness of parties in Bolivia and Ecuador also enabled presidents to manipulate elections, resist democratic reforms, and run roughshod over the opposition.

Chapter 6 examines how parties and the military shaped democracy in Argentina and Colombia. Both countries were ruled by authoritarian regimes in the nineteenth century that manipulated elections to remain in power. A strong opposition party, the Radical Civic Union, arose in Argentina in the 1890s and this party initially sought power through armed revolts as well as elections, but the professionalization of the military at the end of the nineteenth century made armed struggle futile. The Radicals pushed for democratic reforms but could not achieve them until a split within the ruling party led dissidents to come to power. After passage of the reforms in 1912, the Radicals won the presidency, but Argentina then lacked a strong opposition party, which undermined democracy in the long run. In Colombia, two strong parties arose during the nineteenth century and whichever party was in the opposition sought power at times via armed revolt. Colombia professionalized its armed forces in the early twentieth century, however, which forced the opposition to abandon the armed struggle. The opposition began to focus on the electoral path to power, but was only able to enact democratic reforms thanks to a split within the ruling party. In the wake of these reforms, Colombian elections became relatively free and fair, but the country's military was not strong enough to contain increasing regional violence, which undermined the country's democracy.

Chapter 7 explores the reasons why Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela experienced relatively stable authoritarianism during the early twentieth century. All three countries professionalized their militaries during this period, which helped bring an end to the frequent revolts that had undermined their prospects for democracy in the nineteenth century. None of the three countries developed strong parties, however. The absence of strong parties impeded democratization in several ways. First, party weakness allowed presidents to concentrate authority and extend their hold on power in some cases. Second, and even more importantly, the weakness of opposition parties meant that the opposition had little chance of winning elections or enacting democratic reforms, particularly in the face of widespread government electoral manipulation. As a result, the opposition frequently abstained from elections, which only deepened authoritarian rule in these countries. In some instances, the opposition also encouraged the military to intervene to overthrow the president, which undermined otherwise mostly stable authoritarian regimes.